CHIP FIRM Nvidia is launching a five pronged attack in a bid to sell more of its Nforce chipsets, it has emerged. The first prong is its loyal enthusiasts user base, but is also targeting the corporate market, making a bid to grab more share for workstations, promote its Nforce as a basis for the "Media Center" PCs that are out and about, and listly, but not leastly, the consumer market.

Nvidia is claiming that its Nforce 2 Ultra 400 and its Nforce 2 MCP-S1000 offer "ultimate" performance and the "best in the known universe" for Gigabit Ethernet and RAID. Its MCP S100 supports two serial ATA ports and eight USB 2 ports, but also "NV RAID" and and Nvidia GiE. NVRAID, it claims, will offer spare disk allocation, a user interface that's easy to use, and single RAID functions across both Serial ATA and ATA controllers. It reckons that as far as tick boxes go, it trounces its competition including Intel, Silicon Image, Via and Promise because of these features, which also include RAID morphing and transforming.

The MCP-S1000, it claims, includes features for the corporate market including TCP segmentation and checksum offload, support for IP version 6, 802.1P and 802.1Q support, a personal firewall and network management. It reckons stepping A02 will be out in volume in September, in time for the Computex show, while its third stepping will hit the streets before Santa starts ringing his famous bell. A reference board it's making, according to our sources, will be tuned for as much as 500MHz, while NVRAID needs a 4MB ROM (read only memory).